It's rare in this feature to highlight a researcher's work twice in the same year, because it is rare for a researcher to achieve what Gabriel Nuñez's team at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has accomplished. Besides generating at least three Hot Papers on NOD1 and NOD2 in a matter of a few months,1-3 Nuñez helped create the discipline of intracellular pathogen recognition, and influenced the work of scientists in fields as diverse as genetics, innate and mucosal immunity, gastroenterology, and apoptosis research.
Prior to publishing Hot Papers that connected NOD2 mutations and Crohn disease,1 Nuñez and others demonstrated that NOD1 and NOD2 (now officially known as CARD4 and CARD15, respectively) play a role in innate immunity. In these two papers,2,3 Nuñez's team published results arguing that CARD4 and CARD15, both presumably cytosolic proteins, recognize the bacterial cell wall constituent lipopolysaccharide (LPS).2 Further, activating either protein stimulates the immunoregulatory ...
